YouTube
For the first time, video downloads generated from Google’s YouTube site are no longer 100% free. Rather surprisingly, though, users have greeted the new links to fee-based music and content largely with positive comments, if any.
Google-owned YouTube yesterday abandoned its traditional business model of free content provider, adding links to paid video and audio in such a slick manner that most users either didn’t mind or didn’t even notice.
In a blog post Tuesday, “The YouTube Team” mapped out YouTube’s plans to ultimately evolve into sort of an online shopping mall for audio, video, and print entertainment.
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Litigants trying to get data on what the video site’s users were watching have backed off somewhat, although YouTube will still have to share some data with Viacom.
Plaintiffs Viacom and a class-action group led by the Football Association of England agreed to accept a watered-down version of YouTube’s viewer logs. That version will not include the IP addresses nor the YouTube usernames of the viewers.
Earlier this month, a judge ordered Google to turn over this information to Viacom. The media conglomerate had specifically requested information that would have also tied the viewer data to a specific YouTube user.
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Viacom wants to know if anyone with Google or YouTube happened to push some of the content company’s work onto the video sharing site.
Those who have been concerned about privacy and the idea of Viacom perusing YouTube viewing records include a distinct group of insiders, who may have more reason than most to be concerned about uploads of South Park or The Colbert Report.
CNET said Google is digging in against Viacom after a judge ordered Google to hand over private viewing data. Google wants to anonymize it first, but failed to hammer out an agreement with Viacom on doing so with regards to YouTube employees.
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VPPA ignored, EFF claims
As part of the discovery process in the ongoing court fight between Viacom and Google, Viacom gained access to the log data for every video viewed on YouTube.
Somewhere within the Viacom arcology, legal researchers will receive the kind of treasure trove of information that online video rivals to YouTube only dream of seeing. Every video viewed, with IP address and user details, becomes another piece of the legal challenge.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation decried the decision by the federal court for the Southern District of New York. EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl said the decision runs counter to the Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA).
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Call it a characteristic or a problem, but the longest clips YouTube generally allowed only lasted ten minutes. Now some partners are being encouraged to exceed that and post movie-length videos.
Such things have appeared on YouTube before; the 95-minute “Harold Buttleman, Daredevil Stuntman” showed up almost 11 months ago. They’ve been extremely rare, though, and content creators were stuck with annoying limits. Hulu had a definite lead in this category.
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YouTomb, a site focused on tracking all the videos that have been removed from YouTube for copyright violation, is a research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The people who created the site are the MIT Free Culture student group. YouTomb says it,”Continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown.” “The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.” YouTomb records the title of each video that is removed from YouTube along with a description of the video, who uploaded it, when it was taken down and a few screen shots. There are no actual videos that visitors to the site can watch. The site is currently monitoring 223,246 videos and has flagged 4,396 videos that have been taken down for alleged copyright violation. The companies that have removed the most videos include, TV Tokyo Corporation, Viacom International Inc, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and World Wrestling Entertainment. YouTomb says its initial focus is on videos hosted by YouTube, but it is also interested in other video collections. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Web sites are protected from legal action if they remove infringing content after receiving a takedown notice from the copyright holder.
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Sony has confirmed that it is planning to “integrate YouTube functionality in upcoming or existing PlayStation 3 games” and that developers are currently working on such integration.
The new integration will enable gamers to stream capture and upload footage they have recorded while playing games.
“This YouTube upload functionality can be incorporated not only into new PS3 game titles, but also existing PS3 titles that have the ability to receive network updates,” explained a YouTube statement.
“Gamers will now be able to upload their in-game video captures to YouTube. We’re excited at the opportunity this presents and look forward to more and more games to be enhanced with YouTube,” the statement added.
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YouTube says it is changing the way it deals with users who violate its community guidelines.
The video sharing site says it will no longer treat users “who uploads three videos that violate the Community Guidelines over the span of a year the same as someone who uploads those same videos over the course of a week.”
YouTube says its new policy will lift penalties against users who violated its terms of use after six months and that “Accounts that had one or two warnings (as of April 16, 2008) for Community Guidelines (or Terms of Use) violations have been given a clean slate.” The new rules do not apply to copyright violations, which do not expire.
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It’s hard to believe data about 2007 is still being released, but a new Hitwise report is interesting, nonetheless. It seems that social networks and YouTube were quite popular last year, with related terms dominating a list of the top ten UK searches.
YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and a two-word version of YouTube (”you tube”) placed third, fourth, fifth, and eighth, respectively, even though none of them showed up at all on the previous year’s list. Such accomplishments are impressive, to say the least. Bebo, meanwhile, held on to its number two spot.
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